Letters to a Young Poet

The more patient, quiet and open we are in our sorrowing, the more deeply and the more unhesitatingly will the new thing enter us, the better shall we deserve it, the more will it be our own destiny, and when one day later it “happens” (that is, goes forth from us to others) we shall feel in our inmost selves that we are akin and close to it. And that is necessary.

You are so young, you have not even begun, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves

Then try, as if you were one of the first men, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.